On Saturday, Cristiano Ronaldo can take a big step towards a first major trophy since moving to Saudi Arabia but the quarter-final of the Asian Champions League against Yokohama F Marinos also offers a chance to take a smaller stride towards an unprecedented personal milestone: 1,000 first-class goals. Pelé scored plenty but claims of 1,279, … Read more
Over the past three years, Daria Kasatkina has slowly come to terms with a painful truth: the country she was born in, grew up in and represented to great success in the most prominent women’s sport steadfastly rejects her existence. Four months after Kasatkina came out as gay in 2022, the Russian government enacted a … Read more
“Claudio has changed my life,” Borja Iglesias said and all around him, as they jumped and sang and smiled and hugged, his teammates felt the same; he has changed all of their lives. At the end of Celta Vigo’s victory over Villarreal on Wednesday, players and staff crouched low before fans and for the first … Read more
Some of English rugby union’s biggest names will be front and centre in Salford on Friday evening. Maro Itoje, Jamie George, Ben Earl and Tom Willis all start for Saracens while Tom Curry, George Ford and Luke Cowan-Dickie, among others, will trot out for Sale Sharks. Most 20-year-old props, invited to mix in such lofty … Read more
The most extraordinary revelation to come from Gary Lineker’s interview with Amol Rajan on the BBC is that he’d sometimes come home from school to find Engelbert Humperdinck playing cards with his dad. Surprisingly, almost all the reaction to the conversation has ignored this bombshell – Engelbert apparently not such a big player in the … Read more
The weather starts to warm up nicely in Treviso at this time of year and so does the race for playoff places in the United Rugby Championship. Benetton – Treviso’s team and the cream of Italian rugby – are fifth in the league table and on course to reach the URC quarter-finals, booking a place … Read more
It was 2am in the morning and Dean Gibson was sitting in the McDonald’s car park, just to make sure he had wifi access for an important call with an agent based in the United States. The scene aligns with some of the less glamorous stereotypes of working in recruitment and scouting: long nights journeying … Read more
Chelsea put their Champions League defeat against Barcelona behind them with a dominant 4-0 victory against a 10-player Crystal Palace. Guro Reiten opened from the spot before Catarina Macario scored a brace. Mia Fishel rounded off the night to restore their six-point lead at the top of the Women’s Super League. Sonia Bompastor praised her … Read more
Kevin De Bruyne can’t run any more. Or not like he used to anyway. That seems to be the verdict of his Manchester City manager, Pep Guardiola, who obliquely cited an absence of “physicality” in his explanation for leaving De Bruyne out of the lineup against Real Madrid in February. One data point suggests that … Read more
Tony Khan does not look or sound like a man who has just watched his team lose a local derby in agonising circumstances. If he is feeling bruised after seeing Fulham fall to a last-minute defeat at home to Chelsea he is hiding it well. Instead Khan, the vice-chairman and director of football operations, brings … Read more